History and the study of race distribution reveal a mass of facts which represent the contrast and reaction between interior and periphery.  The marginal lands of Asia, from northern Japan, where climatic conditions first make historical development possible, around the whole fringe of islands, peninsulas and border lowlands to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, present a picture of culture and progress as compared with the high, mountain-rimmed core of the continent, condemned by its remoteness and inaccessibility to eternal retardation.  Europe shows the same contrast, though in less pronounced form.  Its ragged periphery, all the way from the Balkan Gibraltar at Constantinople to the far northern projections of Scandinavia and Finland, shows the value of a seaward outlook both in culture and climate.  Germany beyond the Elbe and Austria beyond the Danube begin to feel the shadow of the continental mass behind them; and from their eastern borders on through Russia the benumbing influence of a central location grows, till beyond the Volga the climatic, economic, social and political conditions of Asia prevail.  Africa is all core:  contour and relief have combined to reduce its periphery to a narrow coastal hem, offering at best a few vantage points for exploitation to the great maritime merchant peoples of the world.  Egypt, embedded in an endless stretch of desert like a jewel in its matrix, was powerless to shake off the influence of its continental environment.  Its location was predominantly central; its culture bore the stamp of isolation and finally of arrested development.  Australia, the classic ground of retardation, where only shades of savagery can be distinguished, offered the natives of its northern coast some faint stimuli in the visits of Malay seamen from the nearby Sunda Islands; but its central tribes, shielded by geographic segregation from external influences, have retained the most primitive customs and beliefs.[253]

Expanding Europe has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which the giant can be tripped and thrown.  Asia presents a wide border of marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost continental in their proportions.  Since Europe began her career of maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the course of Asia ever since.  These semi-detached outlyers of the continent have enabled her to stretch a girdle of European influences around the central core.  Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway concessions, missionary propaganda, or political dominion, have permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into the interior.  China and Persia have felt these influences not less than India and Tongking; Japan, which has most effectually preserved its political autonomy, has profited by them most.